Multiplayer Artemis Simulates Life on Spaceship Bridge

It’s amateur hour on the bridge of the HMSS Wired. We’re careening toward an interstellar minefield at warp 3, our chief engineer has accidentally diverted all the energy to the photon torpedoes so we’ve got no power for the main viewscreen, and our science officer has popped off to the loo just as we pass through an unexplored nebula that could be full of enemy cruisers. It’s not going well.

We’re playing Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator, an independently developed videogame that asks you to assemble a crew of between three and six people and defend a sector of space from attack by alien hordes. It’s a whole lot like being on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, but without any of the thorny intellectual property issues that would cause.

Each player is assigned a role — helmsman, weapons, communications, engineering or science — and equipped with a laptop. Everyone except the captain, that is, who instead dishes out orders to the rest of the crew. Orders like, “Set a bearing of 320 degrees, warp 3. Engage” or “Open a channel to the enemy vessel; ask them to surrender.” If that doesn’t get you even a little bit excited, then Artemis really isn’t for you. This is geekery of the highest order, but it’s a whole heap of fun.

None of the jobs is particularly difficult, but the trick comes in getting people to successfully communicate. It’s about giving each person a few, fairly specialized tasks, and it’s crucial that none of them messes up. Artemis is actually a game about social interaction — about getting five of your friends in a room and asking them to do exactly what you say.

If one of your crewmen does do something wrong — your chief engineer forgets to inform you that you’re running low on energy, for example, or your tactical officer forgets to raise shields as you go into a fight — then it all falls apart very quickly. In many ways the captain has the hardest job — balancing the information being shouted at him by five other people and then deciding how best to proceed.

Some of the roles are more important than others. The helmsman will be constantly adjusting course and switching in and out of warp, even during combat. The communications officer, however, only gets to sit back, monitor radio traffic from enemy ships (indicating damage taken) and occasionally press the “Ask for surrender” button. Science is a little dull, too: Performing sensor sweeps and keeping an eye on the big picture is probably more suited to your less-committed crewmen.

Of all the roles, only helm and weapons are required to play, so you can get going with just three laptops that are on the same network. If you’re just playing with that, then the game is free — there’s a demo version that can be downloaded from the Artemis website with a limit on the player number.

For best results, though, you’re going to want to hook up a projector to the main computer, and get a full complement of five friends to bring along their laptops. For that, you’ll need the full version of the game, which costs $60. That might seem like a lot, but split between three people it’s just $20 apiece, and comes with a license for six people to use it. Between a full six people, it’s just $10 each.

The best thing about Artemis is that you’ll come out of it with stories to tell. There’ll be the time when your helmsman skims through a gap between two minefields at warp 3 by the skin of his teeth. There’ll be the time when your engineer forgot to divert any power to maneuvering and you weren’t able to turn, and couldn’t work out why. There’ll be the time when you hid in a nebula until an enemy fleet passed, and then ambushed them with photon torpedoes while their rear shields were down.

Despite that, Artemis does feel a little sparse in places, which is probably because it’s still very much in development. The enemy ships don’t seem to have much AI, and will just make a beeline for the nearest target, then sit there shooting it when they arrive. If you can circle out of their weapons’ arcs, it’s possible to keep spinning in place with a weapons lock and they’ll spin harmlessly around you. The enemy also don’t seem to have a science officer of their own, as they regularly run straight into minefields, blowing themselves up.

Bridge-to-bridge combat between different groups of players is due in an upcoming patch, and that will undoubtedly make things a lot more interesting. A really nice implementation of that could be to make the vessel you pilot the flagship of a small fleet, tasking the communications officer with relaying orders to a group of AI captains, ordering them around.

There are one or two bugs, too. We had a little difficulty getting things working, though nothing that a bit of tinkering with settings couldn’t fix. Top tip — if you’re having difficulty with crashes after you put in an IP address on Windows 7, try right-clicking the game icon and selecting “Run as Administrator.” Also, if you can’t connect, then alt-tab on the server and make sure that Windows hasn’t popped up a firewall exception dialog in the background.

Overall, Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator is ridiculously good fun. It’s well-balanced, challenging without being too hard, and games can be run through quickly enough that everyone will get a chance to take on different roles. The HMSS Wired flew for about four hours solidly, and none of the crew members wanted to stop at the end. We’ll definitely be exploring the final frontier again in the future.